No one lives on the sea ice itself, but 5 million people live on the islands and continental coastlines surrounding the Arctic Ocean. Aleuts, Indians, Inuits, Métis and other indigenous people have had to adapt, over the last 200 hundred years, their traditional ways in response to a fast-changing political and economic landscape.

But for these pan-Arctic people the relatively swift loss of the sea ice, and therefore the peripheral areas of seasonal sea ice upon which they depend, will mean an abrupt end to their way of life. The rapid melt is already depriving them of hunting platforms, traditional travel routes, and food sources.

Enlarged expanses of open water also enable more freak, high-water levels (storm surges). These dramatically increase the erosion of low-lying coastal areas, already weakened as the stabilising permafrost is also melting in response to global warming. An increasing number of Arctic settlements are under threat of flooding and destruction.